About me

I am an associate professor (Docent) at the Centre for Economic Demography, Department of Economic History, Lund University, Sweden. I am affiliated with the Radboud Group for Family History and Historical Demography, Radboud University, Netherlands, where I obtained my PhD in 2019.

My research is about long-term changes in population health, the role of families, the changing disease environment, and the social health gradient. I use linked historical and contemporary population registers to study mortality and a range of health indicators, such as reproductive health, stature, morbidity, hospitalizations, and cause-specific mortality. I am PI on the research project “An Age Old Advantage?” funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ) on exceptionally healthy ageing in families in Sweden and the Netherlands.

I’m the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant for my project “Relative Health: Long-Run Inequalities in Health and Survival Between Families and Across Generations”, on long-term developments in social inequalities in health and mortality in the Netherlands, Sweden, the US and elsewhere.

News

2024-10-02 “Urban Lives. An Industrial City and Its People During the Twentieth Century” is coming out soon. My colleagues and I wrote about demographic developments in Landskrona since the early 20th century. The book, edited by Dribe, Nilsson and Tegunimataka, includes two chapters by me, on the topic of the health premium for married individuals (co-authored with Dribe) and medical changes and their benefits for mothers and children (co-authored with Lazuka and Quaranta).

2024-09-05: I’m the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant for my project “Relative Health: Long-Run Inequalities in Health and Survival Between Families and Across Generations”, on developments in social inequalities in health and mortality in the Netherlands, Sweden and the US. You can find out a bit more about the project here.

2024-03-06: Our paper was accepted in Social Science and Medicine. Luciana Quaranta, Therese Nilsson and I studied fertility outcomes of women exposed to peaking infant mortality, in indicator of high disease exposure, in their first year of life.

2023-10-25: New paper published in Health & Place, on the relation between childhood social neighborhoods and later-life cause-specific mortality. Find the paper here and a summary of the findings here.

2023-07-27: New paper published in Nature Communications, about how long-lived ancestors are related to healthy ageing and disease diagnoses in The Netherlands and Sweden. Find the paper here.

2023-05-02: I received the title of Docent (associate professor) at the Department of Economic History at Lund University.

2023-01-28: My daughter was born, and I will return to work in late spring.

2023-01-24: New paper published in Demography, about living standard, stature and mortality among orphans in the Netherlands. Find the paper here, and a summary on Twitter here.

2022-12-01: I’ll give a plenary talk at the ESHD conference in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, August 30-September 2nd 2023.

2022-09-22: A short interview with me and my colleagues Björn Eriksson and Finn Hedefalk was published in the university magazine. We talk about knowledge transfer and research funding. We’re that airplane that came back as we were all recipients of research funding in 2022. Find the interview here.